My eldest daughter can outhink and outwrite Dowd. But she is 6, so no surprise there.

Amazing that the The Greatest Newspaper In The World (by its own admission) lets this crap go on, week after week, cheerfully unchecked.

I wrote for my school newspaper in college: the editors there exercised more control than the editors of the NYT exercise over Dowd.

I can't conceive of a more efficient way method of "fisking" than what you did here, Mr. Hobbs.
Shining light on oft-employed lies and tired canards by linking them directly to the truth, instead of yet another point-by-point correction... should we coin a new term: "hobbsing"?

Awesome debunking of Holier-Than-Dowd.

Well done.

Is thought required to write NY Times opinion pieces or do they ask that you leave thought at the door?

Hey, Dowd's Miss Thing in liberal circles. Reasoned writing is not a prerequisite. She's in the NYT talking trash about conservatives. That's the prerequisite.

Thanks very much. Great job.

Do you think the Gonzo Lady will post this on its website if you send it in as a letter to the editor? My guess would be that the GL lacks the guts/integrity/decency to do so.

Max

no they ask you to leave the "truth" at the door - thought is fine, since the thinking of those at the Times is what got them their job in the first place.

I think what have here is a Hobbsing, not a Fisking.

I'd call it Hobbeling. Better than fisking because you don't have to have a smug "hey look, I kicked your ass" attitude.

"But one thing you can say for Bill Clinton: His 'Who's gonna stop me?' Oval Office power surge produced a much lower body count."

Well, no. There are 3,000 American bodies that can be laid directly at his failure to take action after the many terrorist acts committed on his watch.

Maureen Dowd and the New York Times are perfect for each other, a true match made in heaven. I hope she never leaves. If the Times only hired Robert Fisk or perhaps John Pilger, I would laugh with glee. May they all dance arm-in-arm into the sunset: the perfect union of the insipid the fraudulent and the lost.

Oh my, this was brilliant! Thank you.

If she keeps this up, history will record Maureen Dowd as the "Tokyo Rose of Terriorism".

Very nice. Like hypertext fiction, only instead of exploring various avenues for shaping hermeneutic engagement with a text (through three-dimensional Deleuzean modalities and interconnected, spatio-temporal (de/re)constructions), Maureen Dowd is a simpering puffpuddler.

Drat. I was going to say that, Jeff.

How many times do I have to tell people? The NY Times may not be what it once was, but it's still the Times. Do you think they'd actually give prime op-ed space to a flibbertigibbet, a caricature of the "woman writer?"

The only possible conclusion is that "Maureen Dowd" (or as we fans call her, "MoDo") is a practical joke played on the readership by the Times editorial board.

I pity poor MoDo sitting home all alone sticking pins in her Catherine Zeta-Jones doll. How very sad.

Hey, in addition to everything else, she seems to have conveniently forgotton that the President's reaction to 9/11 wasn't to go after Saddam, it was to topple those who harbored the Al-Queda network, the Taliban in Afghanistan. But then that would have blown apart her "clever" comparison, wouldn't it?

Beat them over the head with hyperlinks. Brilliant!

My local newspaper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, has succumbed to reader demand and is now running Mo-Do's tripe on the Sunday Op-Ed page. Seeing that Sarasota Co. is about 70% Republican, I'm beginning to wonder just who those readers are.

I'm going to send a copy of this page (links included, of course) to the Op-Ed editor for comment. Let's see what happens.

"But one thing you can say for Bill Clinton: His "Who's gonna stop me?" Oval Office power surge produced a much lower body count."

I assume Dowd chose to ignore the estimates of 100,000 to 500,000 Iraqi children who died from malnutrition and disease as a result of the UN embargo while Clinton was in office...

We can trace our right to free speech and free press to a court case that Alexander Hamilton too on. In this case a printer of a newspaper was printing the truth about the goings on in New York, for which he was arrested and imprisoned.

Hamilton took the case and won.

Who is more at risk today in a court of law, Mr. Hobbs for linking the truth, or Ms. Dowd for toying with the truth for her own reasons?

I don't know. Wish I did.

Great fisking innovation! Hyperlinks w/o commentary -- excellent and very effective.

Ms. Dowd should go on a speaking tour and explain how she has conquered the age-old fear of "being found out". They say everyone has a mortal fear of being discovered as a fraud, based on deep-seated insecurity issues that even the most outgoing among us suffer from, to varying degress.

Ms. Dowd has no such fear, and the straightforwardness and honesty which she extrudes as she throws herself into every piece of claptrap passing as an opinion is actually refreshing in it's own way.

Rock bottom?....no such thing eh, Ms Dowd?

Core's Law of Old Media: We see the Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode partly because America's liberals believe their own lying propaganda.

It's disturbingly fun when you read such things on the tar baby of a blog thread. But when you read Dowd and Ivins and Clift, it's gut wrenching because you know folks are read'n and believe'n. No, no, it's not a gender thing. There are too many level headed female columnists out there. It's the bell curve, I guess. The more you invite to the party, the more dingbats you have to put up with.

Very nicely done. I'm gonna link to it as soon as I finish this comment.

I love it when the Left get's hoisted - regardless of ownership of petard.

I agree with Sharp as a Marble above: Hobbled has a nice ring to it.

Brilliant! Brilliant and well done! I'm going to link to it. With my level of traffic it won't increase your readership any, but it'll make me feel good!

Maureen, oxycontin and cheap gin do not constitute a good breakfast.

No matter what Molly Ivans says.

N. O'Brain
Imperial Minister for Useless Information

Q. Why did MoDo write such a silly column?

A. "Just because she could."

Q. Why did the NYTimes editor allow her column to be printed?

A. "A selfish 'Who's gonna stop me?' power move".

Q. It's easy to understand why jejune Monica subjected herself to pedophile, self-indulgent Clinton, but why do some alleged adults subject themselves to this jejune self-indulgent columnist? And to the self-indulgent NYTimes?

A. Because they're insecure & it's prescribed in "Get Rid of Bush For Dummies!"

TomCom

Congratulations. Please do more of this. I have just removed BBC from my favourites, and added you.

MarkL
Canberra

Mr. Clinton a pedophile? That's a new one, but perhaps I've missed it before. I was under the impression that Ms. Lewinsky was a consenting adult. That was how she portrayed it to Linda Tripp.

Mr. Clinton succumbed to opportunity and his own weakness, no less than many others in public and private life have done. Some of them we know about and some we don't. In fact, we would probably be surprised at how many times this has been played out by people we revere in political life, and not only with those of the opposite sex.

I know several men now who are married to women younger than their daughters, and who live in glass houses.

Think of how different things would be if Monica weren't such a bigmouth.

As for Bush, et al, I believe that history will be very unkind to them for their succumbing to their weaknesses and delusions.

Semipundit,

That's the weakest, lamest defense of Clinton I've seen in 12 years. If I didn't know better, I'd say you were a Republican posing as a Democrat. Yep, Clinton's problems can all be laid at the size of Monica's mouth. Oh well, Bush by 6 points in November.

I addressed the suggestion that Mr. Clinton is a pedophile. I suppose it's a reasonable assumption, considering that Ms. Lewinsky was young and foolish, demure, vulnerable, and had never engaged in such escapades before.

Actually, at the time, I had hoped that Mr. Clinton would resign, giving Mr. Gore the balance of his term and the eligibility to run for two more on his own. In retrospect, I think most Democrats agree that would have been better for the party. Mr. Clinton put the cost of the assault on his presidency at $70 million.

My brother and I were talking about it at the time the impeachment was in process. A Vietnam veteran with real medals, he put it this way: "We could have saved $50 million if they had just made Clinton write one thousand times, "I will not have sex with a big-mouthed whore."

Why does she write such drivel?

Because she can.

Semi-

You were right to call TomCom on his labelling of Clinton as a pedophile. Clinton is actually a rapist. According to feminist theory - power disparity between individuals makes "consent" a moot point. And what greater power disparity could there be than between president of the most powerful nation on earth and some 22yr old intern? This makes it especially egregious. Oh wait -- nevermind. I forgot that the feminist establishment suspended that particular rule for old Bubba. Something about his being of the correct political persuasion...

This article is a great example of Dowd's penchant for using the words of a criminal to attack our President. She's quite tacky, really. Sick.